John Pierce is Head of Business Development at Cetera Financial Group, driving Cetera’s financial professional recruiting strategy.
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With 2022 officially in the rearview mirror, I’ve been reflecting on the year to embrace key wins that can we leverage to generate success this year. While 2022 wasn’t all sunshine and roses, it was a record year for our business development and recruiting efforts, as we attracted more than $13 billion to our firm—up more than 30% over last year.
Here are four key successes and lessons learned in 2022 that you may wish to consider to make 2023 amazing:
1. Invest in your team.
Throughout 2022, we added key talent from coast to coast, hiring top professionals from across the industry. We focused on getting the correct fit for the right positions. There is a tendency to hire “what you know.” We took a different approach. We scoured the marketplace for talent upgrades from firms we have not hired from to get a greater diversity of experiences, opinions and skill sets. We hired recruiting team talent from Kestra, Atria, Raymond James, Securities America and Ameriprise, to mention a few.
Hiring based on high performance alone may lead to a team that is “me” focused versus “we” focused. Be honest with candidates about your current culture. If you explain a “day in the life” and you see that the candidate is not a fit despite being a high performer, take a pass. It is better to pass than to hope it will work out. Hope is not a strategy to rely on, as every hire either enhances your culture and performance or hinders it.
Listen and learn. When you hire a diverse set of professionals, it is important to listen to different opinions, viewpoints, ideas and how to get things done. By hiring from a broad swath of talent, it is incumbent to learn and implement. When we survey our teams, we listen—they know their opinions count and that we will act for the betterment of the team and organization.
2. Build a world-class onboarding and integration program.
As Cetera invested in building our team, we also invested in our onboarding and integration program, knowing that we needed a world-class experience to recruit more and further expand our market share.
We, therefore, redefined our onboarding and integration experience with Accesslink, which "combines technology integration, customized transition planning, and a collaborative approach to deliver a more efficient" experience. Having these more robust end-to-end solutions allows our financial professionals to bring over their clients seamlessly. The Accesslink experience reimagines all aspects of changing firms and joining Cetera.
As a result, Cetera’s recruited assets increased by 10% year over year, a phenomenal result considering the extreme volatility in the markets in 2022. Our Net Promoter Scores (NPS) specific to transitions reached record highs since the Accesslink program was implemented. NPS survey responses increased exponentially as well, confirming that a comprehensive and thoughtful feedback loop is integral to success. Finally, we opened 147% more accounts daily with record-low rejections, allowing our financial professionals to focus on their clients, not paperwork.
3. Remain focused on quality over quantity.
Our reimagined recruiting process embraced the reality that quality is more important than quantity. The industry obsession with headcounts and total assets just isn’t effective anymore. Instead, we focused on the quality of the financial professional’s book. We also made a gradual pivot to an advisory and brokerage business, while letting our competitors overpay for suboptimal assets like annuities, TAMPs and insurance.
We accepted that we would walk away from suboptimal business. As a high-performing team, you want to “win” every deal, but it's important to realize it is okay to celebrate quality wins.
We also personalized and reimagined home office and regional visits. Personalized visits are more important than packing a room twice a month because they help financial professionals absorb and understand our culture. Our process, both in recruiting and transitions, elevated the overall experience, allowing us to win deals that we might not have landed a few years ago.
4. Learn from what doesn’t work as expected.
Change is difficult. When you bring in diverse talent, new ideas and new ways of doing things, it can cause discomfort and unease. That’s okay. To get better, you have to embrace being uncomfortable. YOU have to have an open mind to new ideas and approaches. And you have to refrain from phrases like “This is how we always did it.”
New ideas don’t always work. As a learning organization, we beta many new ideas. Sometimes, they just don’t work. But it’s important to be willing to try something new, embrace a potential risk, and if need be, move on. We would rather try and fail than play it safe.
Embrace the suck. This is a technical phrase from the triathlon world. In hard races, you have to fight quitting 100 different times and finding an excuse to go slower. You have to control what you can, embrace the suck and fight through whatever needs to be fought through.
As we start the journey into a new year, we wish you well in your industry, whatever it may be. We trust that some of our learnings will be helpful as you work to achieve record results in 2023!
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